Publication of research, innovation, challenges and successes is of critical importance to the evolution of more effective distance education programming. Publication in peer reviewed journal format is the most prestigious and the most widespread form of dissemination in education and most other disciplines, thus the importance of understanding…

Reviews literature relating to Bradford's Law of Scatter, which groups journals and articles to identify number of periodicals relevant to particular subject, and notes the gap between theoretical and empirical studies, i.e., no relationship has been found between variables which characterize empirical situations and theoretical models. Thirteen…

Examines the statistical distribution of relevance judgments by reviewing and comparing the results of several studies over the last three decades. A characteristic distribution is examined, and a hypothesis is offered to explain it based on human judging characteristics and the nature of relevance experimentation. (Contains 13 references.) (LRW)

This update of 1978 bibliometric study of online retrieval literature reveals that: literature has continued to grow, reaching peak annual output (504 papers) in 1981; conference literature has become centralized in four major proceedings; online retrieval papers have appeared in 479 journals; and 31 authors have contributed 10 or more papers.…